722 



LIBRARY. 



Library. v ; n has given partial catalogues of some of the libra- 

 ^ ~Y~*' ries at Constantinople ; and a traveller, in 1597, men- 

 tions a valuable collection which he had seen in that 

 city. 



" With respect to Athos, we find that two hundred 

 manuscripts are deposited in one library alone, brought 

 from the monasteries on the mountain; and a great part 

 of those at Moscow had been collected by the monk 

 Arsenius, in Athos, at the suggestion of the Patriarch 

 Nicon. 



" We must add Thessaly, Chios, Corfu, Crete, Cy- 

 prus, Chalce, (the island in the Propontis,) Rhodes, and 

 Epidauria, as places which have supplied some manu- 

 scripts. We should have had much valuable intelli- 

 gence concerning the libraries in the monasteries of 

 Thessaly, if the life of Professor Biornstahl had been 

 prolonged. He had visited all of them, and had re- 

 sided many days at Triccala, for the express purpose of 

 copying a Greek manuscript belonging to a monastery. 

 Biornstahl was attacked by a fever at the foot of Mount 

 Olympus? here he was obliged to continue ten days, 

 without medical assistance, and was then taken to Salo- 

 nica, where he died, in July 1779- 



" Notwithstanding our acquisitions are already 

 great, we should not intermit our researches in the Le- 

 vant. Many manuscripts may be saved by them from 

 destruction. ' I myself,' says Dr. Covell, ' have seen 

 vast heaps of manuscripts (for I never found them on 

 shelves, or in good order) of the Fathers and other 

 learned authors, in the monasteries at Mount Athos, 

 and elsewhere, all covered over with dust and dirt, and 

 many of them rotted and spoiled.' An inquiry should 

 be made into the truth of what was stated to Hemster- 

 husius by some Greeks, ' that part of the Comedies of 

 Menander was still in existence. Application might 

 be made to the Greek nobles of the Phanar, many of 

 whom are versed in ancient Greek, and who are pro- 

 bably the possessors of some valuable manuscripts. 

 Parts of the first book of the Demonstratiu Evungelica 

 of Eusebius were printed by Fabricius from a manu- 

 script belonging to Prince Mavrocordato ; and a copy 

 of the Gvoek Orators, now in England, was the pro- 

 perty of a Greek noble. 



" It may be reasonably supposed, that many manu- 

 scripts in Greece have experienced the treatment which 

 works of the same sort have met with in other coun- 

 tries. Poggius, we are told, found, while he was at 

 the Council -of Constance, a manuscript of Quintilian, 

 on the table of a pickling shop. Masson met with one 

 of Agobardus in the hands of a bookbinder, who was 

 about to use it for the back of a book ; and one of As- 

 conius was about to be employed for the same puspose. 

 Musculus found, in the roof of a Benedictine monas- 

 tery, some of the works of Cicero, and the whole of 

 Ovid. Numbers of manuscripts in Greece are irreco- 

 verably lost to us, either by design or accident ; and of 

 those, which we may hereafter -meet with, we cannot 

 suppose all will prove to be of equal value : 



Yet if we. meet with only few of which we shall be 

 able to say, as Casaubon once said to J. Scaliger, that 

 they arc ' iroAuTiftnTa, et vere xva-<iv avcac%i,' the trouble 

 of research will be well requited. 



" A list of theological manuscripts in the Library of 

 Patmos, has been given by Possevin ; their number 

 mounting, according to his statement, only to fifty-five. 

 The present catalogue, containing the titles of ninety- 

 two manuscripts, and about four hundred printed vo- 



lumes, and of which an account is here subjoined, Libray. 

 by no means precludes the necessity of further exami- ''V"'' 

 nation. The Greek compiler of it has not stated any 

 circumstance relating to the manuscripts, by which we 

 can form an estimate of their value : he gives no infor- 

 mation respecting the form of the letters or that of the 

 spirits, or any of those subjects which would lead us to 

 a knowledge of their respective dates. 



" There is one manuscript mentioned in it, concern, 

 ing which it is impossible not to feel more than com- 

 mon curiosity : it is one of Diodorus Siculus. By an 

 accurate inspection of it, we should learn whether the 

 hopes, which have been more than once entertained, of 

 the existence of the lost books of that historian, are in 

 this instance also to be disappointed. H. Stephanus 

 had heard that the forty books of Diodorus were in 

 Sicily. This report arose, probably, from Constantine 

 Lascaris having said, in Sicily, that he had seen all 

 these books in the Imperial Library of Constantinople. , 



Lascaris fled from this city at the capture of it by the 

 Turks. In the turbulence and confusion of that pe- 

 riod, the entire copy to which he referred might have- 

 been lost. ' Deum immortalem,' says Scaliger, ' quan- 

 ta jactura historiae facta est ammissione librorum illius 

 bibliothecae, praesertim quinque illorum qui sequeban- 

 tur post quintum." 



Mr. Walpole has given a list of the books in the li- 

 brary of Patmos, as copied by the Marquis of Sligo. 



Notwithstanding the sanguine expectations of the ad- 

 mirers of ancient literature, very few valuable MSS. 

 have been discovered of late years ; and it must be ad- 

 mitted, that even those accidentally rescued from de- 

 struction, were in general of comparatively modern 

 date, or of little consequence. Neither the inquiries 

 which have extended to the African states, nor the re- 

 searches at HercultinjEuin, have recovered the lost his- 

 torians, or any works of importance. It was common 

 to make written copies of the Classics alter the in- 

 troduction of printing, and the older editors seem to 

 have been very unskilful judges of the antiquity of MSS. 

 Memoires de I' Academic ties Inscrip., torn. vii. N<.<//- 

 veau Traite dc Diplomatique par deux liotcdictins. Vil- 

 loison, Anecdota Grceca, torn. ii. Fabricius, BMio'heca 

 Grceca, torn. xiv. 



Many of the Romans had libraries. Lucullus insti- Romans-. 

 tuted one which was enlarged by Sylla from the plun- 

 der of Greece, and destined for public use by Julius 

 Caesar. Cicero observes, that he studied in it. Libra- 

 ries were established by several of the emperors, as 

 Augustus, Tiberius, Vespasian, Trajan, and others. 

 Even Domitian sent to foreign countries, for the pur- 

 pose of storing his library, which was consumed by 

 lightning in the reign of Commodus, and restored at 

 great expence by the emperor Gordian, who added to 

 it 62,000 volumes, which had been bequeathed to him 

 by his preceptor Quintus Serenus Samonicus. The 

 most magnificent of all was the Ulpian library, founded 

 for the benefit of the public by Trajan, where the books 

 carried from the conquered cities were deposited. In 

 the time of Constantine, there were 30 public libraries 

 in Rome. This emperor formed a library of 120,000 

 volumes at Constantinople, which was greatly enlarged 

 by his successors, but destroyed by fire ; and was after- 

 wards renewed by Leo Isaurus, who himself ordered it 

 to be burnt. Zonaras says, that there was a manuscript 

 of the Iliad and Odyssey here, on the skin of a dragon, 

 120 feet long : Amiales, torn. ii. 



Little is recorded of the libraries of the middle ages Libraries 

 between the destruction and revival of literature in *e muldlc 



fH, 





